IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/entsoc/v9y2008i04p614-618_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America

Author

Listed:
  • Hyman, Louis

Abstract

It is difficult to consider debt as having a history, because it seems like debt might be, as one popular historian of money in 1917 described it, a “semi-slavery . . . [which] existed before the dawn of history, and it exists to-day.†People, in a certain sense, have always lent money to one another: to a wayward brother, across a saloon bar, to a coworker. But even by 1917, as that popular history was written in the midst of world war, the ancient personal relationship of personal debt was changing into a modern impersonal one. My dissertation is about how what we call personal debt, that is debt incurred by individuals and not by businesses, went from being owed to other people to being owed to institutions, and what this has meant at the largest level about American capitalism.

Suggested Citation

  • Hyman, Louis, 2008. "Debtor Nation: How Consumer Credit Built Postwar America," Enterprise & Society, Cambridge University Press, vol. 9(4), pages 614-618, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:9:y:2008:i:04:p:614-618_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1467222700007552/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lipartito, Kenneth, 2011. "The narrative and the algorithm: Genres of credit reporting from the nineteenth century to today," MPRA Paper 28142, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:9:y:2008:i:04:p:614-618_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/eso .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.